Many women (and some men) put in a great deal of work and effort to constantly show their beautiful visages and bodies to the world.

Seeing the behind the scenes process of becoming so beautiful — for men — is a terror right up there with running into your average masked slasher killer.

The Cucumber Facial. Hair up in curlers. Girdles and corsets. Being Covered in Mud. Wrap treatments that turn one into a Bandage Mummy. Legs and/or armpits unshaved. Any man catching any woman in this pre-glamorous condition will be rooted to the spot, or run screaming. Occasionally, it is this horrifying for other women.

This also includes seeing women without their makeup and other glamour acoutrements: wigs, false eyelashes, etc.

While the Cucumber Facial is portrayed as scary to look at with the cream covering the face and vegetable matter over the eyes, facials are in the main quite harmless, and often beneficial when done properly. Done improperly, they can remove layers of skin.

Lastly, although the trope is called Cosmetic Horror, it can and does include beauty treatments beyond the cosmetic (from corsets on outward) that induce horror when seen as part of the treatment, or just from what they do to the wearer.

Examples:

A Swiffer Sweeper commercial featured this. A woman was in the bathroom giving herself a facial. Her two children look in, see her wearing the facial mask, and run away screaming.

A McDonald's [[advertisement for BIONICLE feature 2 young boys playing with their Bionicle soldiers. As they are playing, someone walks in the door and the boys, looking at each other, both yell "attack" and fire a toy weapon at a "monster" and the toy bounces off a pair of Fuzzy Slippers. The camera then Pans to their a girl presumed to be their older sister wearing a mud mask looking annoyed at her brothers.

Anime & Manga

Rare male example in Black Butler: Cole, Ciel's sabotaging "classmate" (Ciel infiltrated a private school for a mission) is an extremely pretty boy... after a very extensive makeup routine.

One Junji Ito story had a woman obsessed with beauty (a common theme in his work). This one, however, though naked muscles were prettier, and peeled off her skin when at home.

The Rescuers has a scene where Madame Medusa removes her makeup. Beneath her lipstick she has no lips at all, no eyelashes under her fake ones and generally looks like a hideous gargoyle. It's terrifying.

Darla Dimple wears a goopily dripping mud mask during one of her songs in Cats Don't Dance

Jim Carrey as The Mask surprises his landlord while she is in this state, eliciting a scream of mock horror from him — and a real one from her (made funnier by the fact that both of them have green masks on).

Played with in The Princess Diaries. Mia is subjected to an enforced makeover to take her from the awkward geeky girl she is to looking more "appropriate" to the role of Princess of Genovia.

Spoofed in Tank Girl. Tank and Jet at Liquid Silver get explicit robot instructions for their beauty regime including removing "all unsightly body hair". The hologram says at the end that if they followed all directions correctly, "you should appear as so" — but Tank and Jet have their own counterculture idea of beauty, so they look nothing like the hologram. Shortly thereafter, Tank Girl uses scraping off the makeup of the owner with a razor as a threat against those watching. The woman's makeup is drastically overdone. "This might take a really long time," quips Tank Girl.

FBI agent Grace Hart of Miss Congeniality, who doesn't even own a hairbrush, needs to be made over to pass for a beauty pageant contestant. So she's taken to a warehouse, strapped down, and subjected to a barrage of bewildering beauty treatments, including bikini wax. The results are impressive.

Catwoman (the Halle Berry vehicle having little connection to the comics) has cosmetics that required constant use otherwise they would damage the skin of the wearer in a horrific manner.

Literature

Rachel Morgan is grossed out by her own leg and armpit hair in The Hollows series.

Frequently mentioned in the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series, with Georgia's oft-bizarre beauty rituals freaking out the rest of her family. Even when they don't go horribly wrong.

One short story mocking the Call of Cthulhu rpg featured a group of incompetent investigators exploring an old house, unwittingly murdering the inhabitants (taking a janitor's drunk gibberish for Black Speech, a Bandage Mummy for a real mummy, etc.) The climax was the meeting of the owner of the house, an old fat woman in Cucumber Facial and hair curlers - which caused them to shoot her in a panic.

The Lady's Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift. In the poem, Strephon sneaks into the dressing room of his lover Celia only to discover the evidence of the filth and body functions she must go through in order to look as beautiful as he has seen. By the time he realizes that she even averts Nobody Poops, he goes mad from the revelation and is unable to look at any woman without remembering how disgusting they are behind closed doors. The narrator pities him, saying that he'd be far better off if he appreciated all the work that the women put in to their appearances.

Live-Action TV

Tower Prep: In the "Book Report" episode, Ian encounters students that correspond with monsters from Classical Mythology. The student that corresponds to the hideous Medusa is a girl wearing a green facial mask and curlers in her hair.

Ian: Have you ever seen a girl like that before? I mean, it was terrifying.

The Almighty Janitor describes having seen one of the women of the Tipton hotel's staff "in her hair net" as frightening.

In addition, the twins Zack and Cody mistook their own mother for a zombie seeing her in the midst of her mask-and-curlers.

Doctor Who: Cassandra has taken this trope so far that there is nothing left but her face, (stretched over a frame to continue to simulate the illusion of youth) and the intelligence behind it, demanding, "Moisturize me!"

That '70s Show, Kelso sees Jackie without her make-up done and is promptly horrified.

An episode has Patsy get a facial peel to stop the tabloids from overestimating (or so she insists) her age. This results in her looking like a burn victim, and Edina's mother faints upon seeing her.

The show also mocks these sorts of procedures regularly. A facelift is described by the surgeon performing it as "We'll just grab her by the back of the head, shake her up and down a bit, and cut off the slack". Saffron suggests getting one done by doing a bungee jump with the elastic tied to the back of your head. And at one point Patsy is looking at a picture of a celebrity and says "One more facelift and she'll have a beard."

Alex's mom: Want to go for makeovers? Alex: You mean the place where snooty girls fake smile at us while they pluck our eyebrows until we scream and then say "you'd be so pretty if you took care of your skin"? Pass.

Pair of Kings: Girls run a spa that does the usual facials and seaweed wraps, but also steals life force, youthening themselves and aging their victims.

In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca's pre-date routine is parodied with the "Sexy Getting Ready Song". Mid-way through the musical number, the rapper is so shocked by the various tools and blood splatter that he stops mid-verse.

Rapper: "God, what....this is how you get ready? This is horrifying, like...some scary movie or something. Like some...nasty-ass patriarchal bullshit. You know what, I got to go apologize to some bitches, I'm forever changed after what I just seen."

Music

Possibly what is happening in the music video for Calvin Harris' "Acceptable in the '80s", which seems to show scientists extracting hair products from the bodies of animals.

In The Adventuresof Gyno Star, the villain's electroshock torture collar is sold as a fantastic depilatory device for removing unwanted body hair. Despite the fact that it's extremely painful, it sells like hotcakes.

In Imy, the titular character uses the Cucumber Facial as an intentional way to freak out and terrorize a neighbor kid.

Western Animation

Avatar: The Last Airbender subverts and plays with the trope. Katara and Toph are in a spa getting mud baths and facials. It's not considered horrifying until Toph uses earthbending to animate hers and freak out the spa employees.

The Jetsons: Jane Jetson and one of her friends both have visiphone masks for when they haven't done their full beauty ritual yet. Jane's friend sneezes hers off, and shows how terrible she looks first thing in the morning.

Lampshaded in an episode: Candace is a devoted user of Flawless Girl cosmetics, whose CEO unabashedly works the angle of teen girls having low self-esteem to help sell her makeup. Candace figures it out and walks, though.

Also lampshaded in "Isabella and the Temple of Sap". Professor Poofenplotz is eager to get more Stiff Beauty hairspray. It turns out not to have sold well to anybody but clowns and was discontinued. At the end, we discover why: it's pretty much polyurethane as hairspray, and the professor ends up a shellacked statue only able to talk through her teeth.

There's a rare male example in "Downhearted Duckling". Jerry puts curlers, a mud mask, and a corset on a duckling who is suicidal due to being convinced he's ugly. The beauty regime trappings cause Tom to freak out and run away at the sight of him, making the duck's complex worse.

The Black maid character, Mammy Two Shoes, was often seen from the legs down with the lower parts of a girdle visible, for comedy's sake. The white lady of the house, however, was never seen less than perfect. However, in the more recent update of Tom and Jerry tales, Mrs. Two Shoes is white and chubby.

MAD has a short called "Celebrities Without Their Makeup" that implies no-one is really as pretty as they appear, and that their true faces are either horrible or comedic.

Adrian Brody knows when it's time for a little touch-up! [make up brush clears away and reveals the Spy vs. Spy face]

Batman: The Animated Series "Feat of Clay" — A has-been actor who was disfigured in an accident began using an experimental cosmetic cream to help him look good again for roles. The stuff turns out to be addictive (with painful physical withdrawal symptoms), and when he tried to blow the whistle before it went on the market, Daggett's men fed him an overdose, turning him into Clayface.

In The Smurfs episode "Hats Off To Smurfs", Vanity undergoes a horrible cosmetic transformation by splashing water on his face after he started wearing a magic yellow hat that was created by Gargamel.

In The Fairly OddParents!, "Fly Boy", at the end of a night in which the entire town has become convinced a horror movie monster is real, Mrs. Turner comes out of the bathroom, backlit, in the Cucumber Facial. Timmy and his father react as though she's worse than the Expy of The Fly they were watching.

Real Life

Vogue magazine used to warn its readers to never let the man in their life see them in curlers and facial mask.

There is a persistent, urban legend that Raquel Welch had a rib removed to maintain her slim figure.

And then there are corsets and bodices. The popular expression for the relief of removing such a garment is "bodicegasm".

BOTOX. Yeah, it's diluted, but it's a diluted form of the single most poisonous substance known to man. How poisonous? 4 kilograms is more than enough to kill all of humanity, assuming it was distributed equally.

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